Wednesday, 1 February 2017

Big Finish Reviews+ Wave of Destruction by Tony J Fyler

Wave of Destruction

Tony gets Radio Frantic
for a new season

of Fourth Doctor stories.

In a world where the
deaths of legends has recently made the universe we know feel a little shaky
round our ears, Who-fans, rejoice! Rejoice at the fortune which still, more
than thirty-five years after he stopped playing the Doctor on TV, gives us
brand spanking new Fourth Doctor stories, with Tom Baker sounding as bold and
unpredictable as ever.

Season five of the Fourth
Doctor stories on Big Finish audio kicks off by bringing the chronology forward
again – Baker has done seasons with Louise Jameson’s Leela and the now
sadly-passed Mary Tamm as the First Romana, but we’ve never been this far
forward.

Recapturing the double-act
of Season 17 on TV, and of recent novelisations, the Fourth Doctor and the
Second Romana are back, Lalla Ward and Tom Baker sparking off each other in
that accepting but often quite exasperated way that made them such fun on
screen.

They’re back in the 1960s,
and in a neat move, the story picks up with them sitting in the Doctor’s house
in Baker Street, where they were heard in The Auntie Matter, sending K9 off in
the Tardis on a magical mystery tour round time and space to confuse the Black
Guardian. Back then, Mary Tamm was Romana, and it’s a mark of the slightly
absurdist tone of Wave of Destruction that The Auntie Matter, set in the 1920s,
picks up here in the 1960s with Ward’s Second Romana, just as K9 returns from
his trip. It’s that delicious absurdity of tone that studs Doctor Who
throughout 52 years with little moments of genius, their causes cheap but their
effects priceless, and Justin Richards taps into that vein here in a way that
feels unique to this Doctor and companion pairing, a kind of bafflegab moment
of madness, absolutely thrown away and twice as impressive as a result. Soon
though, Wave of Destruction really kicks in and gets going, with laboratories
and dead bodies that, as it turns out, aren’t quite as dead as several others
in recent months have been. There’s a thoroughly annoying pirate radio station
with the jingle from hell too (Something about pirate radio stations seems to
dog the Doctor’s footsteps. If you haven’t heard the audiobook version of Dead
Air, with David Tennant narrating in first person as the Tenth Doctor, you
really should, and you really should right now). And pretty soon – because like
most Justin Richards stories, this one belts along like a supercar driven by a
White Rabbit - there’s an alien invasion to deal with that can only be thwarted
by everybody playing a very specific part, which leads to properly funny Doctor
Who comedy. Richards was asked to provide a story that had the tone of Season
17, something a little lighter than usual, and while, as he says, he never
strives to emulate City of Death, because that’s a pathway littered with the
broken bodies of weeping would-be comedy geniuses, he delivers something with a
bit of that story’s ethos, never afraid to let comedy be comedy, without ever
compromising the deadly seriousness of the approaching, world-conquering
threat.

If Mary Tamm’s Ice Queen
Romana was ripe for comedy by having her comfort zone ripped out from under
her, there’s something almost delicious about hearing Ward’s Romana get the
same treatment – while Tamm was arch in response, there’s something grittily,
fumingly furious about the Second Romana when, in this story, she’s called on
to do things she considers ridiculous and beneath her. While the Doctor goes
off to talk to equipment manufacturers for the making of A Clever Thing, Romana
is packed off with the daughter of the nearly-dead man (Professor Lanchester,
investor in pirate radio because his son is a DJ, fiddler about with waveforms,
because…science!), to go shopping for shoes and appalling sixties pink plastic
handbags. What’s more, when the said DJ son, Mark (played with a louche charm
by Karl Theobald) is caught up an antenna mast, the Second Romana has to step
into his shoes and spin some discs – to save the world, obviously. You honestly
haven’t lived until you’ve heard Ward’s crawling-with-discomfort Romana,
robbing the horrible DJ patter of the confidence it requires to sound like
anything other than nauseating rubbish, as if she’d rather face down a squad of
Daleks single-handed than speak another word of it. It’s priceless stuff, and
Richards wickedly admits on the extras that part of the tone was developed
outward from this scene.

The alien threat in Wave
of Destruction…

Aww, bless. Without
revealing who’s planning to invade this time, you sort of have to feel sorry
for the aliens in this audio. They began their life on TV, and were
staggeringly, mind-bogglingly dull and ineffective. There’s something entirely
mystifying about that, because they have unique abilities that really should
make them properly “Ooooh!” scary – but rarely do. Big Finish has been
significantly kinder to them than TV was, and their particular skills have been
put to effective use on a number of occasions, including here, but it’s as
though they know they’re bottom of the League of Scary Invaders and need to
pull up their Socks of Evil in Wave of Destruction, so they give a lot of
blood-curdling speeches and get quite giggly and hysterical at the thought of
human beings dying in their millions. What’s more, again as if aware they have
something to prove, they’re a pretty trigger-happy bunch this time around, and
good people die with a regularity that adequately serves to ramp up the actual
threat they pose. But if they do a lot of ranting, at least these aliens give
Tom and Lalla a chance to show off the Doctor and Romana’s particular skills, and
their different approaches to being threatened. Romana nips into a TV shop (cue
a sneaky New Who reference), and the Doctor gives a counter-speech which is
part authentic Fourth Doctor, part New Who breathtaker, more in line with the
Tenth Doctor’s ‘no second chances’ nature. The solution to the invasion threat,
as mentioned, requires everybody to be in a particular time and place, doing particular
clever things. Cleverly. If that sounds flippant, it’s unintentional, because
actually giving the Doctor, two companions and a couple of humans something
credible and clever to do in order to save the world is no mean feat within the
space of a quick two-part story.

Overall, should you get
Wave of Destruction? Well, of course you should, but you knew that coming in.
It’s Tom Baker and Lalla Ward, ably assisted by John Leeson as K9 in a
deliciously satirical mood. It’s Season 17 all over again, but with a new
script by Justin Richards on great form. It’s funny as hell without ever
overbalancing the ‘We will kill you now because we want to’ threat of the
aliens (who, incidentally, I’m not crediting, so as not to spoil the surprise,
but who deliver a newish take on an old enemy). And it’s got the rollicking
energy of a season-opener to push along a script that’s anarchic, satirical,
funny and dark by turns. This is Justin Richards being brilliant and fair and
pouring his energy into a script that has a lot to deliver, and knocking it out
of the park. Wave of Destruction is one to get at any price.